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Competitive multiplayer with "threats"

Gosh... I really couldn't think how to describe this without an image.

I'm looking for this.

Games where you are rivals surrounded by a dangerous world. Things are trying to eat you both, sometimes you lure the threat to an opponent, others you are a direct threat, you have to take in not just the contours of the world, but also its inhabitants.

I can think of a few multiplayer games like this, but I honestly feel like I'm missing some.

The Face Off mode in Splinter Cell Conviction, you are both super agile spies well equipped and able to look through walls, but you are opponents, trying to take out guards and each other. Guards keep coming into the level as the previous ones die off and you opponent is hunting you too.

Dark Souls is almost the inverse, a dangerous world punctuated with the threat of multiplayer, but its still little flashpoints of volatile environmental multiplayer.

Driver San Francisco & Need for Speed: Most Wanted, despite anything else, police will chase you both about if you rock the boat.

Spelunky, its odd to consider this one competitive, but you could totally play it that way and there is danger aplenty.

You are getting further and further from what the OP wanted. He seems to want multiplayer games where other players are not the focus. Single-player games where an extra player can join and become another obstacle.

You can certainly play DooM (and maybe Quake) that way. Set the game to Deathmatch, DON'T set the "nomonsters" flag. I recommend enabling either monster respawning or Nightmare skill. In DooM, any player can go to the "end level" switch and force progression to the next level for everyone.

Speedrun stuff like Cloudbuilt comes to mind save for the dlc maps.
Scare stuff that doesn't kill the player comes to mind too. DoT weapons, lights off/on, 1 hp ticking back to the previous amount.
None of this is on co op or whatever.
Obviously Yoshi's Woolly World for eating people :rolleyes:. Idk.

Didn't GTA IV have a mode with elements of this, with two teams trying to kill an AI? Regardless, GTA V PC will (even if only cops in free mode), just not now. And I'm guessing there are Arma 2/3 missions that pit players against themselves and an AI-controlled faction...

Do game modes where two teams are essentially co-operating but can score higher than one another and therefore 'win' count?

I'd say it counts, anything outside of more pure coop games that have mechanical assumptions that you are friends, this is why spelunky doesn't really work. I want to mention kane and lynch but I never actually played it's multiplayer.

Need Fpr Speed 3's titular Hot Pursuit mode is this, with the two (or more) of you racing whilst being persued by AI cops. NFS4 also had it.

Unless you assigned players to be cops, at which point it became either an assymetric multiplayer game or a co-op game (depending on how many players were racers). The racing is a lot more pure then the reboot though: Cars are only arrested when they are brought to a complete halt (and they are indistructable, so the cops have to use boxing tactics), and there's no weaponry to speak off, just pure racing.

The AI cops aren't all that good, be sure to pick slow cars.
If that fails, download worse cars from the internet. NFscars.net has loads.
If that fails, replace the default cop cars with Pursuit El Ninos and Diablos. Have fun!

Airfix Dogfighter allowed you to have AI units on the multiplayer maps, although some config hackery was needed to ensure that they respawn (although just copy-pasting it from the developer's maps was enough).